This book contains the extended versions of 33 papers selected among those originally presented
at the Sixth Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). The
congress of the AI*IA is the most relevant Italian event in the field of Artificial
Intelligence and has been receiving much attention from many researchers and practitioners of
different countries. The sixth congress was held in Bologna 14-17 September 1999 and was
organized in twelve scientific sessions and one demo session. The papers here collected report
on significant work carried out in different areas of artificial intelligence in Italy and
other countries. Areas such as automated reasoning knowledge representation planning and
machine learning continue to be thoroughly investigated. The collection also shows a growing
interest in the field of multi-agent systems perception and robotics and temporal reasoning.
Many people contributed in different ways to the success of the congress and to this volume.
First of all the members of the program committee who efficiently handled the reviewing of the
64 papers submitted to the congress and later on the reviewing of the 41 papers submitted for
publication in this volume. They provided three reviews for each manuscript by relying on the
support of valuable additional reviewers. The members of the organizing committee namely
Rosangela Barruffi Paolo Bellavista Anna Ciampolini Marco Cremonini Enrico Denti Marco
Gavanelli Mauro Gaspari Michela Milano Rebecca Montanari Andrea Omicini Fabrizio Riguzzi
Cesare Stefanelli and Paolo Torroni worked hardy supporting at solving problems during and
after the congress.
